Latin in the Pre-Carolingian
British IslesThis chapter is from Manuel
pratique de latin médiéval by Dag Norberg (Paris, 1980),
English translation by R.H.Johnson(the text is reproduced on
Orbis Latinus with no commercial purpose)

We have discussed the development of the spoken and written language
in Gaul, Italy, and Spain
until the various periods when the vernacular languages became distinct.
We are now going to consider an entirely new situation. In Ireland and
in the Celtic or Germanized areas of Great Britain, Latin was a foreign
element unsupported by the mother tongue of the population. With the help
of manuals and a knowledge acquired at school, only a few scholars attempted
to use Latin.

This was the situation in Ireland from the beginning. Because the island
had never formed part of the Empire, the Irish had never known Roman administration,
urban life, or organization of schools; rather, they had kept their own
traditions and their Celtic language. Still, Latin played a major role
in the civilization of this region because of conversions to Christianity
at the beginning of the fifth century. In the West Latin was above all
the language of the Christian rite and, when Christianity spread beyond
the frontiers of the Empire, no one had any intention of replacing it with
a native tongue. Latin was also needed for access to the Bible and to the
works of the Fathers of the Church. The conversion of the Irish, therefore,
led to the need for instruction in Latin on the island. However, this instruction
had a limited beginning: it was not intended to train bureaucrats or teachers
of rhetoric, but to provide priests and monks with access to Christian
literature. To this end an elementary knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary
of the new language was necessary, but not a deep investigation of literary
texts of the classical era. On the Continent the towns were the centers
of culture, where bishops assumed the increasingly greater responsibilities
of ancient imperial officials. In Ireland, where there were no towns, ecclesiastical
and educational life was concentrated in the great abbeys. The monks studied
sacred texts under the direction of the abbot and devoted themselves to
the austere asceticism for which the Irish monks were known.

The earliest Latin texts written in Ireland clearly show the result
of this peculiar situation. On the one hand, they are full of barbarian
and non-Latin features, while on the other, they have a more learned character
than contemporary texts written on the Continent. The barbarian side appears,
in particular, in the choice of words. Continental authors already possessed
a very rich Latin vocabulary in their mother tongue, and, in general, they
did not have difficulty choosing the appropriate word. For the Irish, however,
all Latin words were equally foreign, and they had to leaf through glossaries
to find the desired expression, and, since their reading was limited, the
stylistic quality of words escaped them altogether. We find, for instance,
in the early hymn Altus prosator, attributed to St. Colomba of Jona
(died in 597) rare words such as prosator instead of creator,
neologisms such as fatimen and praesagmen derived from
fateor
and praesagio, Hellenisms such as polyandria in the sense
of "sepulchres," Hebraisms such as iduma, "hand." The use of Greek
and Hebrew did not mean that they knew these languages. They borrowed these
words from glossaries in the same manner as Latin. In the seventh century
and later, the Irish often sought unusual words for purposes of rhyme,
so that in the hymn Sancte sator, we read: A quo creta cuncta
freta, Quae aplustra verrunt flustra, Quando celox currit velox, etc.
The unknown author succeeded in collecting an entire series of bizarre
forms:
creta for creata,
aplustra "ships,"
flustra
"calm waters," celox "sailboat." He even appears to have borrowed
from the grammar of a colleague the verb
geo, derived from e-geo,
which was considered to be a compound form: Christo Theo qui est leo
Dicam: Deo grates geo (=
grates ago).

The exotic quality of this Latin at times stems from the influence exercized
by the mother tongue of the Irish. This must be the explanation of the
forms staitim for
statim, fleatus for fletus,
diciabat
for
dicebat,
manachus, Alaxander for monachus, Alexander.

But there also existed a learned and conservative counter-current in
the Latin of the island. The missionaries who had brought Christianity
had learned their Latin in Roman Britain, perhaps in Gaul as well. They
knew how to read or, in other words, they had attended Roman schools, and
therefore they brought to Ireland the school pronunciation used in England
and Gaul in the fifth century. At that time, many of the changes which
we have discussed in the preceeding chapters had not yet taken place. We
must also bear in mind the fact that the pronunciation in the schools is
always more pedantic and traditional than that of the people. As Ireland
was isolated from the Continent certain features of Latin were preserved
which the Latin-speaking peoples had abandoned early.

We have, for instance, remarked above
that the sound made by the letter
c was palatalized before the vowels
e
and i in the fifth century on the Continent. This change was not
yet produced definitively in Gaul and England, when Christianity was introduced
in Ireland. The name of the apostle to the Irish, for example, was pronounced
Patrikius and not Patritsius; the Irish even today still
call him Patrick. The missionaries, therefore, learned to pronounce
the letter c as
k, even in words such as caelum and
civis. This pronunciation became a school tradition in Ireland.
For this reason Irish scribes did not write
ci instead of ti
before a vowel as continental scribes often did. Use of alliteration among
the Irish is also very significant. They delighted in tying together as
many words as possible in this way in a line of verse, and we have accomplished
alliterations in verses where the words begin with the letter c:
Clara caeli celsi culmina Cinis, cautus, castus diligentia et Caeli
conscendit culmina Caritatis clementia. Even in the twelfth century,
the Icelanders visiting Ireland found the pronunciation kelum and
kivis, as shown in the first grammatical treatise on the Edda. In
this case, for the longest part of the Middle Ages, on the periphery of
the world, in a non-Latin land, a linguistic practice stemming from antiquity
was faithfully preserved.

Just as important is the handling of endings in the rhymed poetry, where
the technique of the Irish differs from the Latin-speakers. In the regions
where Latin was used, many phonetic and morphological changes were produced
in final syllables. We cannot take up here the complicated history of these
changes. It is enough to remark that
o and u, e and
i
were often confused and that the pronunciation of final syllables was weakened
especially in northern Gaul (cf., for example, L.
vinum > It, Sp
vino,
Fr vin; L sentit > It sente, Sp
siente, Fr
sent). When poets began to embellish their verses with monosyllabic
assonance, they followed everyday pronunciation and they made short
i
rhyme with e, and short u with
o. So Venantius Fortunatus
always makes the iambic dimeters rhyme which he uses in Vexilla regis
prodeunt and Agnoscat omne saeculum. We can conclude that for
him perfect assonance was formed between the words
concinit and
carmine, protulit and
tempore,
praesumeret
and debuit, ordinem and
ambiit,
callido and
invidum, redditum and
prospero, cernitur and
visio, etc. In the same manner, Eugenius of Toledo rhymes suspiriis
and conplacet,
delectatio and solacium, recogito
and
transeunt, and Theofridus of Corbie, for instance, rhymes
principio
with filium, sedibus with
versiculos, geritur
with gladio. The popular pronunciation is reflected also in the
disyllabic rhymes such as
fides - crudelis, Christi
- estis,
adimpleretur -dictum which we find in the
poetry of the Merovingian period. There is nothing similar in the Latin
poetry of the Irish. They never mix vowels in their rhymes, owed no doubt
to the fact that they learned their Latin at school as a foreign language,
which they pronounced in their own way, and which they used in establishing
themselves on school rules.

The exotic, and at the same time conservative, character of Irish latinity
is found to some extent in the ancient Roman province of Britannia. The
spiritual and linguistic assimilation of this peripheral province was not
yet complete by the beginning of the fifth century, when the Romans summoned
their troops to defend the Italian border. The Angles, Jutes and Saxons
did not hesitate to invade the region, and they exterminated the Romanized
population of the towns and drove back the Celtic population of the countryside
further and further to the west. In the land occupied by the Germans, Roman
civilization completely disappeared. In the small kingdoms of the Bretons
of the west, some remains of the ancient civilization found refuge in Celtic
monasteries, where instruction seems to have been organized in the same
manner as in Ireland. There at the beginning of the sixth century Gildas
lived, the author of a work on the conquest of England by the barbarians.
The style of Gildas is inflated and precious, and he is believed to be
the same Gildas who wrote the poem
Suffragare trinitatis unitas,
where the preciosity is carried to an extreme. In this work, the author
seeks to protect himself in accumulating formulas of incantation of pagan,
rather than Christian, inspiration.

* * *

There appear here Hebrew words, senna (tooth), iduma
(hand), and many Greek words, some of which are easy to recognize, for
example
pelta (belt),
cephale (head), eventhough others have
changed their sense,
perna = "member," or their form,
patham
for spatham, "shoulder,"
bathma for
bathmos, "feet."
Even Latin words appear under a more or less foreign form: liganam
for linguam,
madianum for
medianum, talias
for talos. Some words remain unresolved. We find the same exotic
language in the Hisperica famina, which also appears to have been
written in the western parts of Great Britain in the sixth century. Opinion
today says that this unusual work consists of school exercises, in which
the attempt was made to express oneself in an elevated and rhetorical tone,
heaping up rare words placed in an unusual order. If this theory is correct,
the "hisperic" style is the last trace of the activity of Roman rhetors
in Great Britain, but the transplantation to Celtic monasteries resulted
in a grotesque caricature of the original.

The cultural isolation of Ireland and Celtic Great Britain was interrupted
by the pilgrimages of the Celts on the Continent. They preserved their
school tradition, their grammatical education and their pronunciation of
Latin, but they expanded their horizon and began to study classical literature,
traces of which are already discernible in the writings of Colomban (d.
615).

Before this development, the Celtic and Roman civilizations met and
clashed with one another in Germanic England. In the hands of the barbarians
the region was Christianized early and was reclaimed for civilization by
two groups, monks coming from Ireland and Roman missionaries. At the beginning
of the seventh century, the Irish founded several important monasteries,
for example, Lindisfarne and Whitby in the north, and Malmesbury in western
England. In these abbeys an Irish type of education was given to the Anglo-Saxons,
who adopted the Irish pronunciation of Latin, among other things, and preserved
it for a long time. It is likely that the Venerable
Bede and Alcuin
pronounced
ce and ci as ke and ki. We can draw
this conclusion from their use of alliteration. So, Bede regularly uses
two alliterations in each line of his hymn which begins with the strophe:

We have an alliteration between
Christe and cordibus in the
first line, between celsa and caritas in the second, between
in-funde
and
fervidos in the third, and between fletus and
vocibus,
pronounced
focibus, in the fourth (see below). In his poem Nunc
bipedali, Alcuin tied Adonic verses two by two with an alliteration
of this type:

It is, therefore, likely that he pronounced
kerte in the same manner
as kurva in the two lines: Curva senectus certus propinquat.
The Anglo-Saxons kept this pronounciation into the tenth century. When
Abbot Fleury lived in the convent of Ramsay in England between 986 and
988, he composed a little book entitled
Quaestiones grammaticales,
in which he criticizes the pronunciation ke and ki. He writes:
Quod
quam frivolum constet, omnibus vera sapientibus liquet. For him the
pronunciation
tsivis, which he learned in Gaul in his youth, was
nice and proper, while kivis, which he learned in England, was barbaric.
It did not occur to him that, actually, the barbarians had preserved an
ancient usage which the Latin-speaking peoples had abandoned.

Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon civilization would not have achieved its splendid
rise in the time of Bede and Alcuin, without the influence of Rome. In
597, Gregory
the Great sent the monk Augustine
to Canterbury to preach the gospel to the barbarians, a mission which was
to bear extraordinary fruit. The penetration of Roman influence to the
north and west brought on a clash of Roman and Irish interests. The conflict
lasted some decades. But in 669, Pope Vitalian decided to send Archbishop
Theodore,
accompanied by the monk Hadrian, to Canterbury, to organize the church
in England. Theodore was originally of Tarsus and had received his education
in the Greek east. Hadrian, who also knew Greek, came from Africa where
the ancient Roman school-system was still active. Both knew profane literature
as intimately as Christian, Greek as well as Latin, if one can accept the
word of Bede. At the episcopal school and the monastic school of Canterbury,
Theodore and Hadrian brought together a cotery of students who learned,
among other things, metrics, astronomy, computus and who, according to
Bede, pursued the study of Greek and Latin to the point where they spoke
these languages as well as their mother-tongues. We can confirm that his
judgement is correct as far as Latin is concerned. As for Greek, the knowledge
of the language among the English was never profound and disappeared with
the students of Theodore and Hadrian.

The first group of Anglo-Saxons taught at Canterbury still had close
ties to the Irish tradition. This was the case with the first Anglo-Saxon
author, Aldhelm. Before being the student of Hadrian at Canterbury, he
had been taught by the Irish Maeldubh, who directed the abbey of Malmesbury
in the middle of the seventh century. The Latin of Aldhelm presents a two-fold
aspect. Rare words, borrowed from the glossaries, and the inflated style
recall the "hisperic" Latin, which we have discussed. On the other hand,
the linguistic certainty and the wide reading of Aldhelm come chiefly from
his studies at Canterbury.

The following generation brought Latin culture in England to its height,
a result of the new contact with classical authors. In the kingdom of Northumbria,
Benedict Biscop
had founded the great abbeys of Wearmouth and Yarrow between 674 and 685;
to these he gave an important library of manuscripts, brought from Rome.
In the midst of these books the Venerable Bede grew up, first at Wearmouth,
then at Yarrow. Bede is perhaps the greatest scholar of the central Middle
Ages. He handled the Latin language with remarkable ease drawing inspiration
from ancient authors; his style is clear, simple and easy to understand.

The same humanistic activity animates the episcopal school of York,
directed between 686 and 721 by John of Beverley, an early student of Theodore
of Tarsus. Alcuin, born about 730, lived there until 781, when he met Charlemagne
while on a trip to Italy.